La civilisation française en evolution I: Institutions et culture avant la Ve Republique (World Languages) (French Edition)

This wonderful 2 volume set of the history of France has educated me beyond measure. The author has done an excellent job of finding supportive extracts, but what really impresses me are the overviews that begin each chapter. For example, the two overviews of the noblesse and the bourgeoisie in volume one.

This book was for school. That's all I can say. It did its job. There are end chapter summaries that help in summarizing the sections.

The product was delivered timely and was just as described. I am very pleased with this purchase.

Good book, needed it for my class. It's interesting.

What makes this book impossible isn't evident until a few "Dossiers" in, when you're discussing Joan of Arc for the third time after you learn about her death. Why?Because it's organized by topic rather than chronology. I am not a professor or historian, but I am a student of French history and I can only imagine (since I don't have the text book to demonstrate this idea) how much easier it would have been to cover the key players, political movements and societal hierarchies in the order that they happened.Instead, this book is divided into sections ("dossiers") with several chapters each pertaining to a topic. The result is a picture of French history that is disjointed, incoherent, and in my opinion impossible for many of the American students in my classes to follow. Half way through the semester, it's hard to nail down a comprehensive timeline of when the leaders, thinkers and martyrs made their mark, because we've discussed them weeks apart in different contexts.Excerpts from works throughout history from the viewpoint of those who lived it do help enliven the book, but due to the organization, even those are hard to follow. The works of Emile Zola and Voltaire support events in several of the sections, making it très difficile to pin down at what point in history they were written and relevant.This book has made learning about French history, rife with revolution, art, spirit and enlightenment... a chore I can't wait to finish.

This is a good, informative book. I'm enjoying going through it. There is just enough detail to allow you to understand, but it doesn't bog you down with the unnecessary stuff!

Although the book was in extremely poor condition when I received it, the overall informative quality of the book was very rich.

I agree with the other review about the organization of the book. It just doesn't make sense sometimes. It's not 100% chronological and so fosters confusion about the sequence of events. As a student, this made learning about French history more stressful and chaotic than it should have been.Although, for what it's worth, I did enjoy the way it was written. I have no other French textbook to compare it to, but I felt like the narrative flowed, and that made it easier to read through an entire chapter without getting so bored that I forgot I was reading. I am at an advanced level in French, so maybe my opinion is biased, but I also felt like the language used was generally pretty easy. I would only have to look up an average of 1-2 words per page, and this never interfered with my understanding of the material. However, I have to say that the material itself is very dense (French history, like many countries, is convoluted). I also enjoyed the cultural information present in each chapter; many had excerpts from literature or explanations of the trends in popular art of the time.In my class, the teacher had us jump around the book a lot so that we were only studying the parts pertinent to the time period we were covering. So the material seemed a little more linear and organized than how the book presents it. I absolutely hate history, but this book made it a bearable for me. If this book were organized better I think it would make a good resource for teachers of French history and culture.